I have burned the bootloader on a mega 8 and mega 168 with Ponyprog in another circuit using a stk200 programer and a board with out the 16 Mhz crystal. They both blink on pin 13 fine when I place them in the standalone Arduino system on a breadboard circuit but I cant upload a skectch to the chips using Arduino 10 or 9 IDE. I used the hex files from Arduino 10 to burn the megas.

When I put them in my standalone Arduino system on a breadboard (this one http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/StandaloneAssembly) the mega 8 blinks one a sec for 8 times when I reset the mega 8 the mega 168 blinks once about every 10 seconds.

I am almost sure my breadboard circuit is good I have built circuits on breadboards before.

Can someone tell me what bootloader and Arduino IDE I need to use with the breadboard circuit?

I'm not sure. Is ponyprog a software, or the hardware? The stk200 is the software, right? You might be able to use avrdude by creating a new menu item in the Arduino Burn Bootloader menu. Just edit the ARDUINO/hardware/programmers.txt and add something like:

stk200.name=STK200stk200.communication=usbstk200.protocol=stk200

The communication preference should be serial if the stk200 uses a COM port (either a physical serial port or a virtual usb-to-serial COM port) or usb if it communicates directly as a USB device. Or parallel if it uses the parallel port.

I tried the settings and it did not work in the Arduino-10 IDE. It still won't load a sketch to the chip.

Maybe I did not burn the mega 8 and 168 correctly? Ponyprog seemed ok with the burn process. I guess my question is what version of bootloader should I burn on to the megas to use them in a standalone Arduino system on a breadboard?

You can find the fuse settings that the Arduino software uses (w/ the Burn Bootloader menu items) in the hardware/boards.txt file. Since you're using an external 16 MHz crystal, you should be able to use the settings for the NG, either ATmega8 or ATmega168, accordingly.

I am not using a USB connection. I seem to be having trouble opening up my parallel port on my laptop runing XP. I have tried to get Giveio to work (I will look at it more) and have changed the BIOS setting for my parallel port.

It seemed to work once it was trying to write to the mega 168 and I had a mega 8 in the slot using the Arduino IDE. Then I tried again and it stoped working when I tried a second time when I replaced the 8 with the 168.

No errors so far last night with a little pushing and wiggling I got it to work. Thanks so much for your help. I will be moving my project off the breadboard soon and on to a a perf board. Hope all works fine then. Thanks for the help adding the stk-200 to the Arduino IDE bootloader menu. Very easy to do (when you know how).

I also ran into various problems using a STK200. I bought this one on eBay:http://cgi.ebay.com/ATMEL-AVR-ISP-Programmer-For-Parallel-Port-STK-200-300_W0QQitemZ190143362817QQihZ009QQcategoryZ4661QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem

It comes with a 10-pin header, so I made a 10-pin to 6-pin cable with the information I got from this image (from LadyAda.net)

Yesterday afternoon, I had my first try getting this combo to work, I used uisp. I was able to burn a bootloader, but not able to program any sketches from within the IDE. After burning the Arduino bootloader, there was no blinking light too. I also could program .hex files created from within the IDE. For example, I tried the blinking led and it worked.

Last night I tried again and this time it was the other way. I was not able to burn bootloader, but I was able to burn sketches from within the IDE. The problem was that as soon as I connected the stk-200 to the ICSP on the Arduino and powered up the Arduino (through external adapter or through USB from computer), the Arduino wouldn't power up. Removing the ICSP connector of the STK200, Arduino powered up again.

The problem was that as soon as I connected the stk-200 to the ICSP on the Arduino and powered up the Arduino (through external adapter or through USB from computer), the Arduino wouldn't power up. Removing the ICSP connector of the STK200, Arduino powered up again.